Daniel Waterhouse

General Partner, Balderton Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

Daniel Waterhouse is a General Partner at Balderton Capital, serving on the boards of companies like Top10 and Workable. He previously spent five years as a partner at Wellington Partners.

13statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 3.46/5average certainty → 2.46/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 5said about them ↓

2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 4 opinions · 6 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Daniel argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.7 · precision 3.8 · compression 3.8

answered every one of 14 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

253 words/min while actually speaking · 33.6 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,917 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Daniel Waterhouse said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Waterhouse: Entrepreneurship requires a degree of irrationality and blind belief
“If you're completely rational, then I think it's, it can be very hard to be an entrepreneur because being an entrepreneur, it requires you convincing yourself and other people that you're going to do something which frankly is highly unlikely to succeed. And s…”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 6:54 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Insight
Waterhouse: Long-term investing experience matches direct operator backgrounds for VCs
“I think it's important to have been close enough to what it takes to build a business so that you can truly empathize with entrepreneurs as they go on that journey. Now, whether you do that by having done it yourself in one particular field, one particular sec…”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 8:53 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Opinion
Waterhouse: 2015 European seed market has too much capital chasing deals
“If we look today, there's probably A little bit more seed capital than potentially is there to find the great deals.”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 11:41 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Opinion
Waterhouse: Growth-stage venture capital in Europe is oversaturated
“The growth phase is getting more, more intense, and there's maybe too much capital chasing the few really high quality deals.”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 12:03 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Waterhouse: AI self-awareness and existential risk are still far off
“I think we're a long way from a way where suddenly the AI becomes self-aware and, switches on the nuclear bombs.”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 18:38 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Opinion
Waterhouse: Food delivery is the most overhyped sector in tech
“Overhyped is food delivery.”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 19:32 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Disclosure
Waterhouse: Why Balderton decided to invest in Curious AI in 40 minutes
“The last one was actually Curious AI, which we talked about which is as you mentioned, is a new AI company in Finland. And I made the decision in 40 minutes because the entrepreneur is extraordinary, and the ambition of what he wants to do is, is very compelli…”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 20:54 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Insight
Waterhouse: Venture success requires evaluating human factors over pure metrics
“I've learned to be less metric driven. I think as a kind of mathematician and then as a, something I do quite a lot of finance stuff in some of my other earlier career, you become very obsessed just about numbers and data, and the reality is that's important, …”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 5:24 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Insight
Waterhouse: Too much experience makes founders overly cynical and risk-averse
“And there's no perfect answer to this, and we're back to all sorts of entrepreneurs and who've been successful and they don't all look the same, but it seems to me that it's often, there's a benefit of some experience because you know, you've learned some of t…”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 6:26 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Waterhouse: Every small business owner will run on smartphones by 2020
“And so this is a huge opportunity, and I think every small business owner will have their own bespoke software suite, which sits in their phone in the next five years.”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 13:07 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Insight
Waterhouse: Autonomous vehicles require unsupervised learning to handle unexpected scenarios
“Self-driving cars need to have unsupervised learning because there's no way you can tell them every situation they're going to expect.”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 17:37 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Opinion
Waterhouse: Behavioral science in tech is a major neglected opportunity
“Neglected I think applying behavioural science to technology problems.”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 19:35 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI
Insight
Waterhouse: Mathematical training does not help investors evaluate entrepreneurs
“Certainly doesn't help you understand entrepreneurs that takes takes a whole bunch of different experiences, but I think it helps in many regards.”
Daniel Waterhouse Nov 25, 2015 ▶ 4:56 20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes and The Future of AI

The other half of the tape: Daniel Waterhouse's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 5

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00213220152016episodesmentions
01220152016episodes it came up in
001.513220152016episodesmentions per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC 091: Daniel Waterhouse @ Balderton Capital on Investing Styles, Venture Landscapes a Nov 25, 2015 14m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.